Bulletin No. 44
Bogotá, March 27, 2020.
The Colombian Constitutional Court and the Amazon Conservation Team will work together to share with the nation’s indigenous communities the guarantees and protection of their rights, as well as the jurisprudence that the Court has developed in defense of their interests.
Alberto Rojas Ríos, the President of the Court, and Carolina María Gil Sánchez, the Amazon Conservation Team – Colombia Director, signed an inter-institutional Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen the dissemination of the Court’s decisions to the ethnic communities of Colombia as well as their access to those decisions.
The parties, recognizing the role that the Constitutional Court has played in defending the rights of the indigenous population and the experience of the Amazon Conservation Team in working with them, considered it necessary to jointly make progress in the promotion of ethnic rights through tools that provide access to the most emblematic decisions of the Court, as a mechanism for citizen inclusion, participation and integration, highlighting the importance and contributions of the indigenous population to the development of the overall society.
This collaborative work between the Constitutional Court and the Amazon Conservation Team will provide an opportunity for the country’s ethnic communities to develop a pedagogical strategy through digital platforms that will combine technological services and offline support, generating an ideal tool for participation that strengthens the outreach work of the Constitutional Court to all citizens.
This will be the beginning of a unique and important alliance that will facilitate the interaction of the Constitutional Court with the most vulnerable indigenous communities of Colombia, and will generate spaces for dialogue to reach mutual understanding regarding which decisions best suit the communities’ current needs.
The relevance of the joint work that will result from the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding lies in the fact that despite Colombia’s status as a multi-ethnic and multicultural country, and the fact that the country’s 1991 Constitution protects ethnic and cultural diversity through the real and effective achievement of the right to equality, the nation must increase efforts to prevent its ethnic groups from continuing to be subject to serious impacts and threats that violate their autonomy and their territorial and cultural rights and that place their survival at risk.
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